Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday October 07, 2011 @04:35PM
from the it's-not-easy-being-green dept.

the_arrow writes "Apparently there are some politicians who 'get it.' At least it seems that way after reading an entry on the blog of Rick Falkvinge (founder of the Swedish Pirate Party). He says the Green party group, fifth largest in the European Parliament, has officially adopted several of the Pirate Party's stances in a new position paper (PDF). The Greens say, 'the copyright monopoly does not extend to what an ordinary person can do with ordinary equipment in their home and spare time,' adding that a 20-year protection term is more reasonable than 70 years. They go on to say, 'Net Neutrality must be guaranteed,' and also mention DRM: 'It must always be legal to circumvent DRM restrictions, and we should consider introducing a ban in the consumer rights legislation on DRM technologies that restrict legal uses of a work.'"

and there were some people who thought a "pirate party" is crazy and nobody will vote for them. The old saying is always true "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Well, for the Green Party they skipped the 3rd step.

The old saying is always true "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Well, for the Green Party they skipped the 3rd step.

Or they just fired a shot in that third step. Recall that this particular struggle is a very long way from the good guys winning. Sadly, the victories have so far been almost all on the side of darkness/evil/persecution, with extensions of terms to absurd extremes, proliferation of DRM, and legalized oppression requiring nothing more than a flimsy accusation.

True, but media conglomerates winning those battles may end up causing them to lose the war. The Pirate Party and its momentum are arguably due to backlash, and if Big Content hadn't been so oppressive, we likely wouldn't have had so much backlash.

Green parties have been at the forefront of the fight against software patents and for digital rights in Europe since before the first Pirate Party was founded. It's just that they don't think it's the only important issue.

Or that they will just vote against their party's stance in copyright issues for no apparent reason, like Swedish Green MEP Isabella LÃvin did when she voted in favour of the Gallo report [techdirt.com] last year. Her fellow MEP from the Swedish Green party, Carl Schlyter, indicated that there had been a lot of pressure from lobbyists on that issue (but didn't explicitly mention LÃvin).

If a Green MEP had voted against their own party in an environmental issue it would almost certainly had made headlines. Now no

"Green" means a bunch of different things, according to the country in Europe you're referring to. Example: Here in Portugal, the Green party always runs in coalition with the communist party and, because of that, they always have two deputy seats granted in the Parliament. In Germany, the Green party has made coalitions with the right-wing.

That's what happens to the unlucky individual, but often the idea lives on and survives this fight. Just look at your average revolution, there have been plenty of them in the past, and the saying definitely applies to most if not all of them.

OTOH applying it to Al Qaeda and so... they're in the third stage now....

1. Masterpiece (Potter/Tolkien/Shakespeare/Jane Austen/Picasso etc.) These usually make a tone of money in the first 5 years - or don't make any till after the author is dead. In either case, there is no point in extending the length of the copyright. It won't affect the author significantly, either way.

2. Profitable, but not masterpieces. These make their money in the first year, and then fade out quick. By the 5th year, it is practically nothing. But they might do a sequel, which can extend profits. Still, 10 years after the first original work, it won't matter. Either the series has made someone very rich, or their new profits come from the new books, not the old ones.

3. Not profitable. Not in 1 year, not in 10, not in 20, not in 70. NEVER profitable.

There is zero reason to extend copyrights past 10 years, let alone 20.

The proposal in the Swedish Pirate Party's program is 5 years from publication. I don't know why the Greens in the EP thought that they needed 20 years, but either way it's infinitely better than today's life + 70 years which is usually 3 or 4 generations from publication and is obviously insane.

Believe it or not, this is to follow a proposition originally made by Stallman. He said that one must be careful if you want to preserve free software while limiting copyright.

The proposal is therefore that an author gets a minimum of 5 years of exclusive commercial exploitation of his work but can get 10 or 20 years if he authorizes (from the start) derivative works under a free license.

In the absolute I think it is a good idea, and politically it gives room for negotiation, which is always a good th

Of course, a lot of Stallman's concerns and hypothetical were rooted in EULAs. While I often find myself in agreement with him, I think it's simpler to just make certain elements of EULAs unenforceable. Another alternative might be that copyright degrades over time. For example, you only get 5 years for the right to prevent derivative works, 10 years for outright copies.

Simply do what California does in regards to EULA's. They're non-enforcable due to being applied after the doctrine of First Sale unless and only unless the EULA is clearly stated upon the outside packaging before Sale and considering that EULA's tend to run to 50+ pages, I've never seen any packaging that was large enough to fit On Walmart's shelves.

Yeah, and software patents are ok because you have a different computer after loading some software.

Some news for you. If somebody sells you (an end user) a piece of software, that software is sold to be used. It is not sold so that you can keep it at your disk and appreciate the bytes. Somebody is stealing you when ater he takes your money he tells you can't use the software.

That's not the proposal in the Greens' position paper [greens-efa.eu] though. It says that you need to register after five years if you want an extension (to 20 years, I assume). It doesn't mention any requirement to allow derivative works.

Not that I need to persuade you (Slashdot is the choir on this one), but we all know that 70 doesn't mean 70 in this context- it means forever. In a decade, they'll up it to 80. Another decade, it'll be 90. Frankly at this point I don't know why they don't just cut the crap and make it an eternal copyright period; who do they really think they're kidding?

Except the new works would be covered under a new copyright. Also, a lot of the remasters look worse. I recall seeing a commercial for the Peter Pan remaster, and it made the animation tricks they used horribly transparent. And we have some stuff like Han shooting first.

I also think Harry Potter is a masterpiece, but sadly lack the words to explain properly why.

<vague_handwaving>
J.K. Rowling succeeded in conveying concepts about the interplay between interpersonal loyalty and obedience to society's yoke (which got a LOT heavier as the series progressed) which are difficult to describe in any shorter form.
And if you can't write it in a shorter form then it's a masterpiece:-)
<extra_hyperbole>
This could well be the only vaccine to budding fascism

Of course it make sense, since almost all works belong to some publisher. A company can "live" for 50 or 100 years or more. Then it's quite different:

1. Masterpiece, ton of money in first 5 years, more money with the "long tail" in following years - or no money, then it's in some safe or storage room and after the dead of the author it's like described earlier. The more the copyright term the better, to get the "long tail" profits, and exclusion of competition (think of the Beatles, Mickey Mouse, etc).

I'm going to suggest that everyone in here is forgetting about secondary rights. A masterpiece book makes a lot of money in the first few years. Ten years later, somebody gets around to making a movie version. The author of the original book deserves to get royalties from that. It isn't fair to allow freeloading by a major industry off the hard work of an individual, as would be the case if copyright durations were so absurdly short.

Copyright durations should be 14 years, with the option to extend for a

You can legitimately argue that extending copyright beyond some point ceases to be a motivator for the creative process, but cutting off copyright at ten years is basically cutting the knees out from under book authors. Indeed, if you're even asking about people who have been dead for hundreds of years, you completely missed my point. I'm not talking about somebody digging up something written fifty or a hundred years ago and thinking, "I'd like to make a movie version of this." I'm talking about the fac

First, in most cases, authors just aren't paid all that much for the film rights to their books (or at all). It might seem like a lot to an author, but it's not very much by the standards of a movie studio. Usually they'll pay for an option to adapt the book, which is a small fraction of the full cost of the film rights; only if they decide to exercise the option is the full amount paid. And unless the book -- or at least the author -- is a huge success, the full price (which most

For most people on here, the issue isn't the existence of copyright - not even the summary states that. The issue is the fact that, in America and apparently the EU, most works copyrighted in our lifetimes will not enter the public domain until the overwhelming majority of us are dead. In America, the copyright laws have essentially ensured that the songs I hear on the radio today won't enter the public domain until my grandchildren are due for retirement.

Ideally, the working principle of copyrights should enable the author to recoup their time and monetary investments in a work, and then provide a platform upon which subsequent works can be based. If copyright worked the way it is supposed to, sampling in the style of Timbaland (roughly one old song sampled per new song) wouldn't be the norm; sampling as originally started with the Beastie Boys and De La Soul in the late 1980's and early 1990's would have continued throughout the decade (interesting article on sampling here: http://clearance13-8.com/AShortClearanceHistory.htm [clearance13-8.com]). That article discusses the fact that the budgets for sampling royalties for many of those records far exceeded the recording budgets, because everyone and their cousin wanted a slice of the album sales because a five second sample of a song recorded 30 years prior was being used.

The general consensus here, as much as I can group it together, is that copyright isn't *bad*, it's simply being abused. As a mobile DJ, my clients don't owe me money every time they watch their wedding video, nor would I expect them to. No one is saying that it's bad for your "nurtured stuff" to be protected and earn you a living. What is generally held with disdain is the fact that it's kept that way for decades past the point where the original work has earned the creators a profit, and THAT is what is being fought against.

I have no problem with the author, editor, proofreader, typesetter, et al getting paid for their effort. What I do have a problem with is stuff that was good enough for me to enjoy, but not good enough to stay in print forever, _ceasing_to_exist_ when the printed copies of (e.g.) Analog from the 1970s have all rotted away. The publisher probably won't believe enough people will pay for the Adventures of Ferdinand Feghoot to reprint them commercially (and they're probably right), but nobody else can reprint them at all... leaving the only copies of this stuff on pulp paper.

H. G. Wells's work seems to be some of the most recent stuff that's in public domain without the author explicitly saying so. With Disney trying to protect Steamboat Willie forever, I don't see that changing. So from now on (almost certainly for the rest of my life, at least) there will be essentially two bodies of work that can be gotten: reprints of stuff older than about 1920, and whatever is currently for sale. That's it. And that's not fine. That's not "Progress in the Useful Arts" in my book.

So while I understand why you as an author want your rights protected, and I'm happy to keep you fed and housed and producing new work if it's any good, I'm not happy enough to keep your grandchildren fed and housed off your work that I'm willing to watch the good-but-not-fantastic stuff just vanish.

We can debate on the length of copyright, but one thing is sure, copyright should never extend beyond the death of the author/artist/musician/etc...

As someone who makes a living off of creative works, I strongly disagree. Say that you have an author who writes an incredible book. He or she dies a week after its publication. Under your scheme, the author's family gets one week's revenue even though the author put in five years of his or her life to create the book in question. That's hardly reasonable.

What you're failing to take into account is that unlike other occupations, unless an author, painter, sculptor, composer, or performer is working for a corporate overlord, he or she gets paid over time as the product sells. That means that he or she has spent years creating something that will help support his or her family afterwards. The incentive to create is based on the promise that the creation will be worth something to his or her family going forward, and it is that promise that encourages authors to accept that delayed payback. If you change the law so that the delayed payback won't happen at all if you die too soon, you're encouraging people to limit themselves to jobs that pay you as you go along, and thus significantly reducing the incentive to create.

The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to create creative works. It's unimportant whether copyright will continue to encourage a particular author to create new works. The promise that the new work would pay to feed his or her family after its creation was what encouraged the author to create the existing work. Therefore, it should not matter whether the author is alive or dead; the author's kids or other beneficiaries should have the right to that income.

Further, your scheme could encourage less reputable publishers to off their authors so that they don't have to keep paying royalties.:-)

I'm strongly of the opinion that copyright terms should be for a period of 14 years, renewable by the author or his/her descendants for 14 more. The author's death should have no part in the copyright term whatsoever.

Say that you have an author who writes an incredible book. He or she dies a week after its publication. Under your scheme, the author's family gets one week's revenue even though the author put in five years of his or her life to create the book in question. That's hardly reasonable.

Funny. If I die I don't think that my company will continue giving my wage to my family. And the weird thing is that nobody thinks it should be any other way!

What does an artist's family have that's so special compared to anybody else's?

And even so, the money they get paid while working eventually runs out.

Nobody is arguing about that. It doesn't, however, stop simply because the person died, and that was my point. It stops when the specified amount is paid out. In much the same way, copyright should end when the specified number of years has expired, without regard to when the person dies.

Yes. And it's such a shame if it doesn't sell well. Too bad. I think it's worthless to pay people who created nothing (the family).

It stops when the specified amount is paid out. In much the same way, copyright should end when the specified number of years has expired, without regard to when the person dies.

Well, I'm going to have to disagree.

Whether a work sells or not has no bearing on this discussion whatsoever.

I was demonstrating something that could be considered unfortunate. The work didn't sell, the creator died, etc. Too bad.

The question is how many people can honestly say they would bother to create something if it was 100% guaranteed that their loved ones would get nothing after they died?

Okay. So why not tell me how many? It doesn't matter to me. Poll every artist and creator in existence (or most) and get back to me instead of seemingly pretending that you speak for all of them.

Either way, you're still failing to come to grips with or in any way refute the core of my argument, which is that the author agrees to take payment later, and you're arguing that the author should lose that payment simply because he or she died. That just doesn't make sense in any sane universe.

I understand your argument. I simply don't agree with you. Do you believe that anyone who disagrees with you must be 100% wrong and you must be 100% right? I mi

Data seems to suggest that authors often do better without a copyright system. Royalties are in practice a false hope that non-superstars will never see any significant money from. Lump sums are generally better. We have data from Germany and England when the former had no effective copyright and the latter did. Germany had lots of books printed cheaply, with the authors getting decent lump sum payments, because their concern was to sell as many copies as they could before competitors had a chance to.

No, my argument is why copyright can't work anymore, unless we break or illegalize nearly every computer. The disappearence of producers in a market where production capacity is ubiquitous and production cost is infitessmal is just a side effect.

And we should legalize child pornography (it's on computers!) and legalize money counterfeiting, too because you can't make every copy machine illegal. I just love how people who use this argument are really just rewording the old "might makes right" argument -

The European parliament is definitely not "pretty decent overall". The members of the large party groups (the two conservative ones and the social democratic one) are just as bought as the commission and the national governments. For some reason the lobbyists just don't bother that much with the smaller party groups.

IMO, the law on DRM should be this: you can protect your property with DRM or you can protect your property with copyright law but not both. If you elect to protect your property with DRM, you can still seek injunctions or collect real damages but you are no longer eligible for statutory damages under copyright law.

This is an interesting proposition. It basically means that if you're going to use DRM, it's you're own damn fault if it doesn't work and gets copied anyways. Then since it doesn't actually work, they'll stop using it so that they can collect statutory damages again. People still get screwed for torrenting etc, but now at least we can copy in peace for legal purposes.

Until they try mass threats to random people trying to convince them that copying CDs to their iPod was illegal, and sue cloud music servi

In the US, DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) circumvention is illegal under the DMCA, right?

A while ago I started to wonder. I am regularly receiving some shipping documents in pdf format, and routinely copy/paste bits of text out of them, like document number or so, to add to my own administration. No problem on my Linux box. However once I tried the same while working on my iBook with Apple's pdf viewer, and then I got the message "not allowed to copy" or something in those lines. That was obviously

I know a student who suffers from dyslexia, because of his disability the educational support board (a government institution) have lent him laptop with expensive reading programs and stuff... They've also granted him some money (5000 USD) for getting books scanned at 3 USD per page, because none of his books are available in digital format without DRM that makes text-to-speech impossible.
IMO, these publishers should be fined, obviously they have digital versions of their books, but because of DRM they mus

To put it another way: DRM is nothing but vigilantism. Vigilantism is not outlawed, but the law does and should frown on people taking the law into their own hands as we invariably trample on others' rights when we do.

Before digital distribution, 5-7 years was considered an adequate amount of time to monopolize an idea. You'd think that number would go down with faster distribution because the creator could get it out there faster.

I just want the right to create without the incumbent publishers breathing down my neck claiming that my work is a "non-literal copy" of a mainstream publisher's work. Do you remember what happened to George Harrison with his song "My Sweet Lord" (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music)?

Before digital distribution, 5-7 years was considered an adequate amount of time to monopolize an idea.

Do you have a source? Because copyright lengths were getting longer a long time before digital distribution. And, as I recall, the very first time someone asked for copyright (he was an author in Venice asking the government for exclusive rights to print his book as that he could get adequately compensated for his hard work), he was granted a term of 10 years. I've *never* heard of 5-7 years as being

>>Before digital distribution, 5-7 years was considered an adequate amount of time to monopolize an idea. >5-7 years is the period in which a profitable creative work typically makes the overwhelming majority of its profit.
While I generally agree that a profitable work will typically see the majority of it's profit in the first 7 years. When he says, "was considered" it raises the obvious question "by whom"? By society? Society reached a well-known consensus on that question? I doubt he has

Longer terms of copyright is no solution but short copyright terms means FLOSS programmers end up contributing to proprietors as if they were public-minded charities while giving the public nothing in exchange. Considering a 5-year term of copyright, Richard Stallman correctly points out [gnu.org]:

[W]hat would be the effect of terminating this program's copyright after 5 years? This would not require the developer to release source code, and presumably most will never do so. Users, still denied the source code, would still be unable to use the program in freedom. The program could even have a “time bomb” in it to make it stop working after 5 years, in which case the “public domain” copies would not run at all.

Thus, the Pirate Party's proposal would give proprietary software developers the use of GPL-covered source code after 5 years, but it would not give free software developers the use of proprietary source code, not after 5 years or even 50 years. The Free World would get the bad, but not the good. The difference between source code and object code and the practice of using EULAs would give proprietary software an effective exception from the general rule of 5-year copyright — one that free software does not share.

I think the Pirate Party should take Stallman's warnings more seriously than I've heard Falkvinge take them in the past (I believe it was a Google talk in which Falkvinge merely dismissed Stallman's concerns without ever r

So what's the difference right now? Even with long terms, proprietary developers don't usually release their source code, and while they don't booby-trap their software, it effectively is not much use after a long span of time has passed. OSS software would have its source available, but also would not be of much use after such a long span of time.

I remain in favor of short terms, particularly for software, but term length is far from the only reform to copyright law that we need. I don't even think it's th

and other old stuff that you can no longer buy other then used and or having to hunt the barging bins.

Let say you want a older game or app and there is no store that has it that can be found easily. Now amazon marketplace and or ebay does not count as they used copys and there is the issues with e-bay scams as well.

Now why should have to drive store to store and hunt for older games when it is alot easier to just download them off a torrent or a abandonware website?

Mod parent up! Once the copyright owner stops commercially offering a product, it should be legal to copy it. I should be legal to circumvent restrictions that prevent copying, and possibly even legally required by the owner to provide support for this. This goes not only for software, but also for music. One of my favourite CD's was not produced for 15 years until the band finally managed to convince the record company owning the rights to sell them.

The Greens only hold about 7.5% of the seats. The largest parties are the Conservatives (36%), Socialists (25%) and Liberals (11.4%).

In most countries in the EU the Greens are an opposition party on the national, and thus have relatively little influence in policy. They have been part of government in Germany for a while and are often on the local level. They also are often pro-free software and open standards. This is why you see a lot of city counsels pushing for the use of OSS on the local level.

No, the article is about the copyright policies adopted by the Green group with 56 elected representatives in the highest legislative body of the European Union. Which happen to coincide to a large degree with the copyright policies of the Swedish Pirate Party, probably because they have a MEP who is a member of the Green group.

And it is worth noting that the Scottish National Party are part of the Green group, and they are the party of government in Scotland. However copyrights are a reserved matter for the Westminster Parliament, so it doesn't help Scotland that much.

Having said that, the Liberal Democrats, part of the coalition government in Westminster and part of the Liberal group in Europe which is the third largest party there, have very favourable views on the Digital Economy Act that was passed by the previous administra

Which happen to coincide to a large degree with the copyright policies of the Swedish Pirate Party, probably because they have a MEP who is a member of the Green group.

It should be noted that the Greens were already fairly critical and that is why the Pirate Party joined it rather than be an independent, but I'm glad to see they're moving in the Pirate Party's direction. For all those that don't know the EP though, it has 736 representatives so the Greens in total are 7.5%, obviously fighting most for their green policies. They're a long way from changing EU politics, but hopefully they can at least be the critical voice.

Being independent was never an option, since committee positions, speaking time and other resources in the EP are mainly allotted to party groups, not individual MEPs. There is an "independent" party group of otherwise unaffiliated parties, but it consists mainly of racists and loons that no one else want to have in their group.

The plans of the Pirate Party, as they were announced before the last election, were to negotiate with any of the serious party groups and join the one that made them the best offer

That the Pirate Party was willing to negotiate was clear, it wasn't all that clear how well received they'd be. The groups mostly mirror traditional party blocks and PP didn't really fit in any of those. A lot of the mainstream press and probably representatives considered it to be one of the "loons" based on the name alone. If nobody wanted to give them time from the group, being in the group would be pointless. ALDE didn't offer much of anything from what I remember, about on par with just being an indepe

Their stance is that both the public (consumers in your statement above) and creators have rights. Creators' exclusive rights should not be for an absurdly-long period, but if a particular property proves to be profitable the creator has the option to extend their exclusive rights for a nominal cost. In any case all rights revert to the public within approximately one generation.

Do your creative endeavors require eternal copyright to be profitable? I would love if people could use my 20 year old code, for me that was a mix of perl and c with a lot of assembler for odd processors/platforms. Creators have the rights they were artificially given by copyright law pre printing press there were no real protections. You always have the choice to not publish or only publish to a select clientele. It's not property it was artificially made into something resembling property by act of la

The creators (or rather publishers) have far more rights than they ever should have to begin with. The systems in place have been abused to the point that we won't see half the things from our childhood enter the public domain in our lifetimes. DRM makes everything a pain in the ass and they know damn well they aren't stopping piracy but instead making it a hassle for normal people to use their devices the way they see fit. These practices need to be shot down now. To say that content owners are being g

American IP principles? That's a good one. The US had much weaker laws than most of Europe for over a century (Berne convention was 1886, and the US joined in 1988, and we didn't really pass Europe up until the DMCA in 1996). During that period, global demand for US entertainment media rose dramatically. Perhaps some Europeans were paying attention and realized if they had a more permissive culture, they might get their own Hollywood.

Not only that, but Hollywood started as a pirate operation. You know all those people wanting to make movies, why did they choose to go to california instead of staying on the east coast? For the weather ? No, they went to the west coast to get out of reach from Edisons' patents. Isn't it ironic, that the pirate industry par excellence is giving lessons of morality to the entire world. Fuck Hollywood, they are a cancer to society. Edison should have sued the hell out of them, and if not he should have sent

Maybe it's somewhere down there on the list of reasons, but I doubt it'd even make the top ten. Lot more languages, lot more different cultures and once you cross that border it's a "foreign film". Some countries go a little better together like Scandinavia but there's us, the English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and then some with dubs of varying quality losing a lot of lip sync and intonation. Hollywood is the exception in penetrating most of Europe, not the norm. I would say it's due to two things.

A lot of money is still made through channels that aren't purely digital. For example, movie theaters. Most people don't have movie theaters in their homes, so if you want the full experience of a film, you need to go through a commercial channel, and said channel would be protected by copyright.